I look at Nerys.
"Good," she says.
One word. No smile. No elaboration. She writes something in her notebook and moves to the far end of the practice green to set up the next drill.
Good.
That single syllable burns hotter than every compliment I've received in the last three years of professional golf. Hotter thanincredible,fearless,electric,unstoppable. Hotter than the praise I get from sponsors who love my face and commentators who love my swing and fans who love the version of me that attacks everything and never looks afraid.
Good.
Said by a woman who is not easily impressed. Directed at a putt, not a face. Earned by mechanics, not spectacle.
I want to hear it again.
I want to hear it in a different context entirely.
I line up the next putt and try to focus on my fingers and not on the memory of hers.
•
She works me for three more hours.
Short game. Chipping. Bunker play. Course-management scenarios with a whiteboard she's brought in the back of her rental car — a portable whiteboard, like a high school teacher who golfs, which should be absurd and is instead oddly compelling because she draws course layouts from memory with a precision that suggests her brain contains satellite imagery.
She asks me to choose between two shots on every scenario. I choose correctly about seventy percent of the time. The thirty percent I get wrong are always the same type: situations where the safe shot is clearly superior but requires patience, and the aggressive shot offers a lower probability of success but a higher probability of looking spectacular.
"You choose the aggressive line when the reward is visible," she says, capping the whiteboard marker. "Birdie from a recovery. Eagle from an impossible lie. A finish that would make a broadcast reel. You choose correctly when the reward is invisible — a well-managed par, a bogey that could have been worse, a lay-up that sets up the next shot. You don't value invisible rewards."
"Because nobody sees them."
"You see them. Isn't that sufficient?"
I don't have an answer for that. Or rather, I have an answer, and the answer isno, it isn't, it has never been sufficient, I need to be seen being brave because if no one watches then the bravery might not exist,and that answer is so raw and embarrassing that I'd rather snap another club than say it out loud.
Nerys watches me not answer. She doesn't push.
"Enough for today," she says. "Tomorrow we do on-course work. Nine holes. I'll have a strategy for each one. You follow the strategy or you explain why you're deviating before you hit. Not after. Before."
"And if my explanation is good?"
"Then we adjust together. This is not obedience, Tala. It's communication."
She packs the whiteboard into her car. I watch her move — efficient, long-limbed, unhurried. She lifts the whiteboard with one hand and slides it into the back seat, and the ease of the motion makes something curl low in my abdomen.
"Nerys."
She straightens. Turns. The light is behind her now, mid-morning, and it outlines her silhouette — the height, the lean shoulders, the silver streak glowing copper at the edges.
"The grip adjustment. You could have just told me where to put my hands."
"I could have."
"But you didn't. You touched me."
"I demonstrated a physical correction. The proprioceptive feedback is more effective than verbal instruction for grip changes."
"Is that why you did it?"
